"Why! If you take that tone, of course I will hold myself at your
disposal whenever you are at liberty to attend to this affair. But I
don't think you will cut off my ears."

"I am going to attend to it at once," declared Lieutenant Feraud, with
extreme truculence. "If you are thinking of displaying your airs and
graces to-night in Madame de Lionne's salon you are very much mistaken."

"Really," said Lieutenant D'Hubert, who was beginning to feel irritated,
"you are an impracticable sort of fellow. The general's orders to
me were to put you under arrest, not to carve you into small pieces.
Good-morning." Turning his back on the little Gascon who, always sober
in his potations, was as though born intoxicated, with the sunshine
of his wine-ripening country, the northman, who could drink hard on
occasion, but was born sober under the watery skies of Picardy, made
calmly for the door. Hearing, however, the unmistakable sound, behind
his back, of a sword drawn from the scabbard, he had no option but to
stop.

"Devil take this mad Southerner," he thought, spinning round and
surveying with composure the warlike posture of Lieutenant Feraud with
the unsheathed sword in his hand.

"At once. At once," stuttered Feraud, beside himself.

"You had my answer," said the other, keeping his temper very well.

At first he had been only vexed and somewhat amused. But now his face
got clouded. He was asking himself seriously how he could manage to get